Family life

Readers' favourite photographs, songs and recipes

Snapshot ... Lusia Taylor, above left, as a baby, in 1976 on her great-grandmother’s lap. Behind are her grandmother, and her mother, Bernadette. Right, four generations in 2008, from the back: Lusia, Bernadette, and great aunt Ciocia Hela, holding baby Eliza
Lufia Taylor

Snapshot: Five generations of women

The photograph on the left was taken in 1976 when I was a baby – behind me are my mother, her mother and my grandmother's mother, on whose lap I am sitting. Back then, we were all living in close proximity. This photograph was taken in my grandmother's house on a terraced street in Huddersfield. Her own mother lived next door, with my mother and I living a few doors away, although we would soon be living in this house after the separation of my parents.

My grandmother was a formidable matriarch, watching closely over our family and ensuring that her three grownup children moved close enough to visit daily. Babcia (as Polish grandmothers are known) arrived in England in 1948, aged 21, after an eight-year journey that began when her family were taken suddenly from their home in what was then eastern Poland and transported as Russian prisoners to Siberia. Years of struggle and suffering followed, as Babcia's family were eventually deported across Russia (losing her brother en route after he disembarked at a station to buy bread), through Uzbekistan and former Persia, before finishing in what was then Rhodesia, where my grandmother worked as a nurse.

I grew up listening to her fascinating, other-worldly tales of hardship and hunger so desperate that she ate turtles and snakes to stay alive. But she would also talk of a typical adolescence, of daring escapades and boys with strange names and blurred, sepia faces that cropped up occasionally in old albums.

I look like a happy baby in this photograph, despite our lack of money. Babcia worked in "the Polish shop", along with, what seemed to me, most of the local Polish community. Nowadays, continental shops are common, but then it was seen as a special place, second only to the church in its importance in the community, providing gossip along with homemade pierogi (dumplings).

As the first of many grandchildren, I was the happy recipient of Babcia's fiercely devotional and often obsessional love. This carried on through university when, every week, she would send me a chocolate and small letter (always the same few words of love, written in an increasingly arthritic hand), later becoming a daily telephone call. It was only when my daughter was born in 2006 that this intense love for me eased slightly as it transferred, in an even stronger form, on to baby Lila.

My grandmother idolised her first great-grandchild with a passion that surprised even my mother and me. For a short time, she seemed to possess a renewed strength to battle ill health, although when I was two months pregnant, in February 2008, she finally passed on. A few days before that, in a moment of clarity as she lay in bed in my mother's house, I told her of the coming baby, who was given the middle name Genovefa after her great-Babcia.

I always planned to recreate this photograph of the four generations of females when my own daughter was born. Sadly, it never happened, but when my second daughter was a few days old, I asked Babcia's beloved sister, Ciocia Hela, to be part of the updated four generations photo. As you can see in this second photograph, my mother, Bernadette, a Babcia herself now, looks as lovely and glamorous as ever.

We see Ciocia Hela regularly, and the children adore her. She has recently taken to talking to me about those devastating experiences that took her on such a lengthy journey from a happy childhood in rural Poland to what would eventually become a happy adulthood in northern England. Ciocia has recently spent time in hospital and, as she told me when I last saw her, she may be the only survivor from her community who made this particular journey. As the girls grow up, I shall tell them about these earlier sisters, these two survivors who made it here, against the odds, and who adored them in their infant years.

Lusia Taylor

Playlist: The moon watched over me

On the Road by John Denver

"Go home, said the man in the moon, go home / Because it's gettin' sorta late / And I'll soon turn out my light …"

This song echoes across times and places for me. I remember my parents lifting up my brother and me and dancing to this around our living room in Greater Manchester when we were very young and feeling safe and protected, despite my father's itinerant work patterns in his engineering job. Later on, Dad found a new job on the Firth of Forth and we moved.

As we waved goodbye to our house, Mum started to hum this tune. As the streets of Manchester rolled away and we began to climb our way further and further up the country, the moon rolled out from behind his cloud, lighting our way across the moors of lowland Scotland. We reached the little flat that was to be our temporary home while we looked for a house and climbed out of the car under an ink-black sky, and saw the moon again before we clambered upstairs to bed. In the night, a local comedian walked over the bonnet and roof of our car, leaving a neat line of foot indentations, under the light of the silvery moon.

Those first few months felt strange and lonely. We would go for walks on the blasted, beautiful beaches and through the woodlands near our new home. I can still remember the moon throwing a silver path over the tar-black Forth, shining through the bare winter trees. He was keeping an eye on us, but also wanted us to get home safely before he switched off the light.

Over time, we began to put down new roots, settle in, make new friends. For years, I preferred the moon to the sun because of that cool but caring silver light.

Years later, while courting my German wife, we spent Christmas in the Black Forest. During a night-time visit to the toilet, I glanced through a window to see the same calm face keeping an eye on that vast, beautiful landscape. It made me feel that things were starting to come together.

And now, five years on, in our house in Yorkshire, my three-year-old son has just sung the chorus to me on the changing mat as I got him ready for bed. Echoes arriving back across times and places. Jonathan Doering

We love to eat: Easter soup at Grandmother's

Ingredients

1 roast chicken carcass

A bunch of garden marjoram

4 peeled carrots

2 potatoes

1 onion

A handful of pearl barley

Water to simmer the carcass

Prepare the chicken stock first, add the other ingredients, simmer until ready, and season to taste.

Level with my nose, a vast, prewar pan brooded on the green Belling stove in the back kitchen, the lid opening and closing like a giant clam, releasing a heady, tantalising promise of perfection. The soup-making ritual lasted several days after our Easter Sunday roast. The chicken carcass was simmered until the bones turned soft, the meat falling away, and a miraculous transformation occurred as the precious, clear, golden stock formed.

Slivers of sweet, transparent onion and potato bobbed with pearl barley among sprigs of marjoram that I had been sent to pick from the garden. The flavours filled the house and clung to our clothes.

And then it was ready. I remember the cracking of an old pepper grinder, turning its worn-smooth wood slowly. I dunked warm bread that soaked up delicious oily droplets from the surface. I sucked the soup from it, dipped my spoon, hunting for morsels of chicken, saving the liquor until last. It was as good and as comforting as food gets. Disaster struck one year as I tipped the whole bowl over myself – it wasn't the scalding pain of my burned leg that caused me misery, but the loss of the soup, the disappointment after so much anticipation.

It is 30 years since we have made the journey north for Easter and since my grandmother died. I have passed on the soup tradition to my 11-year-old, and every now and then I do manage to repeat that elusive, perfect chicken soup. Claire Williamson

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